Take Back the Night—and the Garden
Originally posted at The Way of the Rose 54-Day Novena Facebook group February 10, 2021
Novena Day 14
The Sorrowful Mysteries
I found myself in therapy in the late 1980s because I didn’t understand how to receive the nurturing I deserved, especially in sexual relationships. My therapist, Fred, had been trained in Primal Therapy. The process of unraveling soul-crushing trauma by following the trail of excess emotion turned out to be a very effective tool for me. In fact, I uncovered so much that one day I actually found myself reliving my birth. It was terrifying, so much so that I vowed I would do what I could to make my children’s births less traumatic.
Right from the start, I had trouble receiving the nurturing I craved in this lifetime.
I started therapy in my late twenties because I was in a turbulent relationship with a man who must have been terrified of intimacy. Every time we approached a new level of intimacy he would do something to blow things up. The roller coaster ride was too much for me and I wanted off, but anytime I thought about breaking up my anxiety would go through the roof. It was obvious I couldn’t live for long with these conflicting emotions; I needed help to walk through the fire.
Of course, I learned in therapy that I was attracted to people who were afraid of intimacy because I was afraid of intimacy. I knew my relationship history was a recipe for disaster, and I was unconsciously keeping the parking brake on.
What I didn’t know was that I had unresolved traumas long before I started dating that affected my beliefs around love relationships. One of the big secrets I uncovered after a couple of years of therapy was that I was sexually abused at the age of seven (by a doctor in a screened-off section of the principal’s office in my Catholic school) and likely abused at a much younger age as well. Like the birth memory, this memory wasn’t accessed through words, making it likely that it too was stored in my brain and body before I had language to use as my filing system. The memory isn’t clear, so I don’t know exactly what happened. While I have pieced together a likely scenario, all I know for sure is that I was very small, powerless, and frozen in terror, and the memory was triggered whenever I said “no, thanks” to sex or my boyfriend woke me in the middle of the night.
Painful as it was to work through the trauma I carried around in my body, I had to in order to understand why I couldn’t even imagine a truly nurturing relationship with a lover. I remember a conversation with a friend around that time. He had an enthusiastic scene partner who turned out to have a romantic interest in him. My friend, who had long since renounced romantic relationships, let the scene partner down easy; they were able to stay friends. When my friend was rehearsing a big role, this man wistfully said, “If I were your lover, think how much help I could be running your lines.”
Such an innocuous statement, but it struck my friend forcefully. It had never occurred to him that a lover could be helpful in such a situation. In his past relationships, he would be lucky if his lover were not actively obstructive. It was no wonder he wasn’t interested in romantic relationships.
Even after several years of therapy, I realized I had trouble believing in that scenario as well. A lover could be helpful? Why, then, did I expect mine to derail my creative life?
Romantic relationships, like family relationships, are a huge potential source of nurturing, yet so many of us are walking around completely oblivious to that possibility.
I read a poem earlier this week by someone who had obviously been told by psychics and card readers that she too was psychic. At first she denied it, but then acknowledged that, yes, sometimes she did just “know” things. If she had this amazing power, why did she shut it off? She spoke of a life in which she was persecuted for exercising those powers, as if they were somehow inherently “bad” rather than her link to the divine and the “garden.”
I could relate. I, too, have been told by psychics and card readers that I am highly intuitive. I, too, just “know” things sometimes. And I, too, had shut off that power out of fear. Something that should be a joy and a talent to be nurtured, not to mention a way to help nurture others, had become the opposite—a liability.
Those of us who walk around cut off from the possibility of a nurturing love relationship are suffering from a similar betrayal. Somewhere in our past, sex or love (or both) have been ruined for us by someone who used them to harm us.
While this can be true for men, especially those who were abused as children, the phenomenon is overwhelmingly female because women have traditionally had less power than men and have been easier to harm in this way. In addition, we are frequently trained to nurture rather than to receive nurturing. In fact, the damage to our collective psyche is so widespread that most people still don’t see it for what it is.
I was reminded of that repeatedly during the Brett Kavanaugh hearing in 2018 when numerous people (including a cousin of mine who is the father of three girls) would say things like, “Yes, Christine Blasey Ford is a credible witness. The attempted rape probably did happen as she said it did. But it was many years ago, and he doesn’t even remember it. Should one teenage ‘indiscretion’ ruin his life?”
“Ruin his life”? Is that what we call it when a privileged white man is not given a permanent seat on the highest court in the land? What about her life—and the many years she spent recovering from that trauma so that she could eventually participate in a nurturing romantic relationship? And attempted rape is not a “youthful indiscretion.” It is a traumatizing attack on another, less powerful, human being and should permanently disqualify anyone from holding a position with such power over others’ lives, especially if the perpetrator has made no acknowledgment of the harm done or attempt to make amends.
Clay Masterson posted an article yesterday that irked me and got me thinking about all this. The article discussed Maria Goretti, an 11-year-old girl who was stabbed fourteen times and killed by her 20-year-old would-be rapist rather than submit to him. The Catholic Church canonized Maria in 1950 as a martyr for “modesty and purity.” Bad as it is that the Catholic Church used Maria’s horrific death to promote their unhealthy agenda in 1950, the article was about Anna Kolesárová. Anna, a 16-year-old Slavic girl shot to death by a Red Army soldier in front of her family in 1944 when she resisted his attempt at rape, was beatified in 2018 by Pope Francis (you know, the “cool one”) as a “martyr to purity.”
Three years ago—even after the MeToo movement and the Church’s own sexual abuse scandals—the Catholic Church was still conflating violent sexual assault with the “temptation” of joyful sexual exploration. Assuming “sexual purity” is the highest goal for a woman, male Church officials continue to fetishize children killed by violent sexual offenders.
I’m sorry for the vulgarity, but that is some fucked-up patriarchal rape-culture bullshit. And the longer it goes on, the longer it will be till the victims of that mentality are able to reclaim their agency and find the joy and nurturing they deserve in sexual relationships.
When I was working through my own trauma, I came to the conclusion that I could not say a joyful “yes” to sex unless I was completely free to say no—and make it stick. That revelation helped me get to the point that I began attracting relationships that were much more nurturing. With my own healing, I have cleared enough to be able to see the same dynamic of unresolved trauma playing out all around me.
Unless and until we go through this same process as a culture, unearthing the traumas of the past and intentionally healing them, fiercely defending the concept of consent and women’s right to seek sexual pleasure without patriarchal shaming, sexual relationships will continue to be disappointing battlegrounds rather than nurturing crucibles for love alchemy.
Perdita wrote earlier about the sexual freedom unleashed by the Woodstock festival in 1969 that was subsequently all but ruined by sexual predators within so-called “spiritual” communities who took advantage of the situation. With our huge societal history of sexual injustice and unresolved trauma, I believe that was an inevitable outcome of our craving to get back to the garden without properly clearing the path first.
It’s important to understand that this clearing is not a linear process. There are many layers of trauma to peel back, like the layers of an onion, and each layer of fear we remove releases more energy for love.
This is the “virginity” worth fighting for (see Clark and Perdita’s discussion of the word “virgin” in their book The Way of the Rose), not the Catholic Church’s definition.
When this nurturing energy is truly flowing freely, we will have reached the “garden” we intuitively crave. We will know we are there when we feel the lotus flower bloom in our hearts.
